For roughly 15 years, Tesla and Lucid Motors have been waging an exciting battle for supremacy in an electric vehicle industry with hundreds of billions of dollars at stake.
Now, you can watch their cars literally race past one another at insane speeds on a quarter-mile strip of pavement.
DragTimes, a popular YouTube channel, recently staged such a race between the Lucid Air Dream Edition and Tesla’s Model S Plaid. Both cars are their company’s highest-performance sedans, meaning they each offer exceptional horsepower.
The Lucid Air Dream Edition, which has a starting price of $169,000, comes with up to 1,111 in horsepower, according to the company’s website. The nearly $125,000 Plaid version of the Tesla Model S checks in with 1,020 in horsepower. For comparison, the average sedan has between 200 and 300 horsepower, according to Autolist.
So, how did the battle between these two powerful EVs play out? Tesla’s high-performance sedan beat its rival from Lucid in three out of four attempts.
Lucid’s car only prevailed after host Brooks Weisblat deactivated the Tesla’s “Launch Mode,” which improves the Model S Plaid’s acceleration to help it go from zero to 60 miles per hour in just 1.99 seconds. It does so at the expense of the car’s battery power, and as Motor Trend notes, the feature takes several minutes ahead of time to prepare.
By comparison, the Air Dream Edition needs about 2.5 seconds to go from standing to 60 MPH. And as HypeBeast noted on Wednesday, Tesla’s car weighs about 400 pounds less than Lucid’s car – which could also help explain why the Model S Plaid reigned supreme on the drag strip.
Neither Tesla nor Lucid Motors immediately responded to CNBC Make It’s request for comment. However, Weisblat noted in the video that a spokesperson for Lucid Motors told him the company’s focus is more on “luxury and efficiency” than on speed.
“If there’s an 1,100-horsepower car that comes out, do you guys want to see how efficient it is?” Weisblat asked viewers, seemingly rhetorically. “Or how fast it is?”
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